"It is not the intent of this book to confuse fact with fancy." Authors RobertShea and Robert Anton Wilson insert this modest disclaimer on page 760of their 800-page postmodern sci-fi work The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Perhapsthey should have offered these words of warning in large print at the outsetof volume one.

In any case, I don't believe them for a second. I'venever read a work of fiction that tries harder thanThe Illuminatus! Trilogy to blur the boundariesbetween truth-telling and myth-making, or to mash-upDelphic pronouncements with bald-faced lies. ThomasDisch, a sci-fi author who would defer to few inconcocting outlandish tales, once compared RobertAnton Wilson to Oliver Stone, the filmmaker whosemovie JFK mixed conspiracy theories with historicalfacts in a manner some viewers found exhilarating,others intellectually dishonest. Yet such a comparisonis unfair to both parties. Wilson and Shea dish up"explanations" of the JFK assassination (and otherseminal 20th century events) that border on thehallucinogenic. Stone, by comparison, seems likean honorary member of the Warren Commission.

Readers of The Illuminatus! Trilogy learn, for example,that John Dillinger, the infamous bank robber killed bythe FBI outside a movie theater in 1934, actually survivedthe incident and turned up with a gun at Dealey Plaza on November 22,1963. But he was late to the event: several other organizations hadalready placed operatives on the scene with orders to shoot the President—and the real question, according to Wilson and Shea, isn't who plannedthe assassination of JFK, but which gunman managed to pull the trigger first. But if you seek ultimate answers, you need to dig below the scene of thecrime, to the underground lair of the Dealey Lama, whose office is locatedunder the sewers of Dallas. He’s a wise robed and bearded man whopresides over a powerful secret society, and is perhaps more influentialthan either the President or conspirators up on ground level.

Full disclosure: there are many powerful secret societies hatching obscureschemes in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. You will need to keep a scorecard ifyou want to track who is doing what to whom. And these nefarious cults areso secret, even members aren't entirely certain who calls the shots, andwhat goals are pursued. Some play it safe by joining multiple secret groups—one character in this book even operates as a quintuple agent in theemploy of five separate organizations. In the long, rich history of paranoialiterature, from Kafka's The Trial to Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, no work offiction has made a bolder attempt to find conspiracies within conspiraciesand masks behind masks.

It would be easy to laugh at the bizarre and extraordinary events presentedin The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But, like Vonnegut and Pynchon, those othermasters of Cold War paranoia literature, Wilson and Shea deliberatelyembrace absurdity and farce as a mask for more serious concerns. In thecourse of this book, you will encounter talking dolphins, Adolf Hitler as anold man, the ancient kingdom of Atlantis, mind-reading and Tarot cardprognostication, as well as a bunch of other newsworthy discoveries thateven The National Enquirer would scorn as implausible. Those who claimtruth is stranger than fiction, haven’t read this kind of fiction. Typicalexample: When the characters discuss Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan,a real-life Leviathan shows up a few pages later. They fear for their lives…but then take some comfort in realizing that they are merely characters ina book. Yet one speaks up with a sobering view: "In the absolute sense,none of us is real. But in the relative sense that anything is real, if thatcreature eats us we will certainly die—in this universe, or in this book. Since this is the only universe, or only book, we know, we'll be totally dead,in terms of our own knowing."

Did you get that? Fortunately, the Leviathan decides to marry some smartcomputer software and live happily every after. And this is one of the morecoherent subplots in a book that constantly veers in the direction of an acidtrip style of realism.

Yet as I look back at my description of this book, I realize that I have misledyou. Because this book is just as serious as it is absurd. Even as Sheaand Wilson pile up ludicrous incidents on top of one another, they also wantto convey words of wisdom. As strange as it sounds, given my summaryabove, The Illuminatus! Trilogy wants to possess the authority of non-fiction. The authors add footnotes and appendices, and work hard to substantiatemany of their claims with citations and evidence. Not all of the sourcesare real ones—I am rightly skeptical when any author backs up claimswith references to the Necronomicon by the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. But much of the documentation withstands scrutiny. Shea and Wilsonadd to the peculiar flavor of their work by frequently inserting long passagesthat can only be described as a counterculture philosophy of life. When youreach the final pages of this work, you will find that your greatest challengeas a reader is not evaluating the literary merits of the trilogy, but determininghow much of it the authors themselves actually believe—and, by extension,how much credence you ought to give to their claims.

At a minimum, grant these audacious authors credit for uncanny predictionsabout their future (and our present). When forced to specify the goals of thedominant conspirators, they offer this wish list:

"Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws.Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, bloodtests and urinanalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with acrime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Lawsestablishing detention camps for potential subversives Gun control laws.Restrictions on travel…."

This list was published in 1975, but could show up in a current-day editorial,and none of the items would seem out-of-place. Of course, many items onthis wish list are no longer wishes, having come true during the interveningyears. On a host of other issues, from gay rights to the decriminalizationof marijuana, the authors shrewdly anticipated a future in which libertarianand authoritarian impulses have both managed to implement aspects oftheir conflicting agendas.

But I do need to mention the literary merits of The Illuminatus! Trilogy,even if the work itself asks for evaluation on other grounds. In an erawhen sci-fi books pushed the boundaries and adopted many of the devicesof highbrow fiction, few authors raised the stakes higher than Wilson andShea. The shifts in chronology, perspective and tone are as dramatic asanything you will find in the most fashionable postmodern authors of theday. The clever and cryptic allusions to other works of fiction could keepscholars busy for years. (Try counting the references to H.P. Lovecraft,for example—you might find a hundred or more in these pages.) Withthe exception of Samuel R. Delany, no sci-fi writer of this period drewmore heavily on James Joyce; you will even encounter a recurringsoliloquy toward the conclusion of The Illuminatus! Trilogy that emulatesthe stream-of-consciousness of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wakeand Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

In short, The Illuminatus! Trilogy ranks among the most ambitious worksof the middle decades of the twentieth century, even as it resistscategorization. Crazy and sane by turns, the work may best be representedby a symbol that recurs in its pages: the Ouroboros or serpent swallowingits own tail. In this instance, the reader is also asked to swallow a very talltale. But the strangest part of this very strange story may be how much of ithas come true.